AmateurRadio.com

Series Four Episode Twenty of the ICQ Podcast has been released. News Stories include :-

• Ham Radio Deluxe purchased
  
• Android Smartphone CubeSat
• SO67 safe but problematic
• Body as Antennas
• UK record for 434.650 MHz balloon
• Region 1 recommends Band Plan changes
• New JOTA info and badge
• National Hamfest Special callsign
• Canadian Amateur Radio Hall of Fame
• ATV world first - Hams wedding

Your feedback, Steve Nicholls (G0KYA) propogation report and Martin (M1MRB) reports on 21st Century PMR.

It was a lot more difficult than I’d expected, but I finally received official approval from the ARRL’s DXCC desk for my TI7/K2DBK operation earlier this year. I’ve been holding off writing about it until I had resolution, one way or another, hence the delay in writing this.The issue had to do with the licensing authority in Costa Rica. Here’s the story as I understand it.

A couple of years ago, the organization responsible for issuing all radio licenses in Costa Rica was reorganized. That organization, SUTEL, apparently revised the laws regarding all radio services in Costa Rica, but somehow they neglected to revise the rules pertaining to amateur radio. In fact, they didn’t include rules about amateur radio at all after the rules revision. As a result, they had no way to issue or renew any amateur licenses, regardless of whether those licenses were for residents of Costa Rica or for visitors. As I understand it, this was an oversight, not an intentional removal of the amateur service from Costa Rica.  Previously, for a US amateur to operate from Costa Rica, you’d have to fill out some forms and pay a nominal fee at the SUTEL offices in the capital city of San José and you’d walk out with your license. Unfortunately, after the laws were revised, there simply wasn’t a way to get a license.

I didn’t know any of this earlier this year when I decided to operate from Costa Rica. My concern was that you had to physically go to the SUTEL office in San Jose to get your license.

The location where we stay in Costa Rica is in the northwest portion of the country near the city of Liberia, and it’s a pretty significant drive to San Jose.  (The green marker is where I was staying, the blue is San Jose.)  Although Costa Rica isn’t a very large country, a multi-hour drive through a country where I didn’t speak the language (and where were weren’t planning to rent a car) just didn’t seem very appealing. What I thought I would do is to post to a couple of the DX lists to ask if perhaps there was a way to get a license online, or perhaps to see if there was someone in Costa Rica who could do the paperwork for me in advance, and mail it to me either at home or where we were staying. I got back multiple responses, both from US hams who’d recently operated from there as well as a couple of hams who live in Costa Rica, all of whom told me about the situation with SUTEL.

Among those responses were a couple that said that based on conversations between the ARRL and the Radio Club de Costa Rica  there was a working agreement in place so that for amateurs from countries that had reciprocal operating agreements in place with Costa Rica (the US does), that as long as the visiting amateur is in the country legally (a copy of a passport stamp can be used to prove this) and they held an appropriate US license (I hold an Amateur Extra class license). they can operate legally from Costa Rica. The only other requirement is to use the appropriate regional prefix, which for my operation was TI7, indicating the Guanacaste region. Based on that, I operated as I’ve previously described, and assumed that I’d have no trouble having my operation officially approved for DXCC credit (for others, of course) and getting a Logbook of The World certificate, necessary to upload my QSOs to that system. As I said, it turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I’d expected.

To be continued…

The Arduino project announced some news at MakerFaire 2011.  Here’s a video of a talk from Massimo Banzi:

In a nutshell, they are working on a new release of Arduino called “1.0″ or the “1.0 Core” which is going to break some things, but also set the stage for a more consistent and stable platform going forward.  There are new hardware revisions for the Uno and Mega boards.  The most notable change with these boards is the addition of several pins to support a two wire interface (I2C) bus which will enable much easier and standardized interfacing to shields.  There is also a new Arduino that has an Ethernet interface built in, rather than having to use a separate Ethernet shield.  (Shields are optional boards you can stack on Arduinos for additional capabilities.)  I’m very interested in this board as it also has an SD slot for memory storage.  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a logger module for the keyer project.  Why?  Because I can and it’s never been done :-)

The project is also releasing a WiFi shield which opens up a lot of possibilities.  Another dream geek project I’ve had has been to place Arduinos in various places throughout the house and the yard for doing various things like reporting the temperature or sensing intruders.  The Arduinos could network via WiFi and report to each other or back to the mothership.

All and all it’s an exciting time in Arduino land.  If you haven’t tried using one of these little boards, you’re missing out on some fun.  The applications in amateur radio are endless and with the power and functionality steadily increasing, I expect in a few years we’ll be doing things like DSP or perhaps have a rig-on-a-shield.

My son and I had another lesson this evening before bedtime. This time I dug out my paddles and my electronic keyer, since I was afraid that my imperfect fist at the straight key could do him damage.

My fears were well placed!

HT: http://www.rfcafe.com/references/qst/this-business-of-code-feb-1941-qst.htm

It turns out that in our first lesson I made my “dahs” much too long. This caused him some grief when I started using my electronic keyer since the “dahs” and the “dits” sounded too much alike to him, accustomed as he was to my goofy fist (which shall now be rectified ASAP!).

So we spent most of this lesson just fixing my mistake, getting my son to discern between perfectly proportioned “dits” and “dahs.”

I’m glad we caught my mistake on this second lesson and not several months from now! But I still feel bad for exasperating my son.

So to all you would-be Morse Elmers out there, learn from my mistake! Whatever quirks you may have in your fist may be exacerbated at low speed. So unless you have a perfect fist with a straight key, use your electronic keyer right from the beginning when teaching Morse Code.

Bob Heil, K9EID, of Heil Sound and Ham Nation fame sent me this e-mail which may interest clubs looking to expand their educational offerings:

Of interest to all clubs in the UK or actually just about anywhere,  I have been doing workshops for radio club meetings using SKYPE. This is a fantastic use of technology.   The club brings in a projectoror large TV driven by a computer connected to high speed Internet and through SKYPE we communicate two way.  It helps the many clubs – no matter the size to have fun, educational and entertaining programs for their meetings.Let all of your readers know that we are available to do this.  Address inquiries to me, Bob Heil   [email protected]  or Gordon West at [email protected].

A letter written by fellow amateur Christopher Seright, KE5ZRT has been posted on several blogs and on social media platforms such as Facebook and Google+.  I’m sure most will agree when I say some of our fellow hams and some amateur radio clubs are not as tolerant to the the recent changes in licensing procedures and new hams in general.  This episode I read the letter Chris wrote along with a poem by Eddie Phillips, N4EMP.

I hope you’ll listen and share this information with others.  You can download or stream episode 47 of the Practical Amateur Radio Podcast from MyAmateurRadio.com. 

Thank you for your time.

73 de KD0BIK

After a lightning strike near his house took out a good portion of his shack, John, W5CYF, has posted a video bringing his viewers up to speed to on how his shack is coming along after he has started to get some new equipment to get back on the air. He seems to have a nice collection of radios. Shown in the video is a TenTec Century 21, and a Kenwood TS-520, along with some filters and an MFJ Tuner. In previous videos he described what happened with the strike. While you can never predict when a lightning strike is going to happen, you should still plan for it. Ground your station. I was the victim of a near strike myself. It luckily only fried a few switches in my old FT-901DM. After that, I started grounding the station. While it was unfortunate, we can all learn from this. Here’s the update from John.

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, Albany’s #1 Rock Station website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday on AmiZed Studios and hosts a podcast called The Kim & Rich Show with his fiance’ Kim Dunne.